The MPAA wants popular BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay to hand over $15.4 million in damages for allegedly facilitating copyright infringement, but The Pirate Bay's fearless captain Peter Sunde thinks that the movie industry's case doesn't have a peg leg to stand on.

In 2006, the motion picture industry trade group filed copyright infringement lawsuits against a number of BitTorrent sites, including TorrentSpy and isoHunt. TorrentSpy lost, thanks to its admins' willful destruction of evidence, but isoHunt is fighting back. A recent filing in the case opposes the MPAA's motion for summary judgment, arguing that isoHunt is just another search engine.

I made a list of the 22 ways to sell music and 20 of them still require DRM," RIAA technology unit head David Hughes said during a panel discussion, according to CNet. "Any form of subscription service or limited play-per-view or advertising offer still requires DRM. So DRM is not dead."

Representatives of the RIAA and the Writer's Guild of America were also on hand. For these groups, the traffic filtering favored by telcos is a close cousin of the content-based filtering that they favor for combating piracy. As such, they clearly have an interest in helping ISPs enable some form of network filtering on a non-neutral 'Net. But the actual state of the Internet is less important to the RIAA than blocking piracy so, since it has been far from successful in bringing all ISPs on board the filtering bandwagon, its representative played hardball.

Representatives of the RIAA and the Writer's Guild of America were also on hand. For these groups, the traffic filtering favored by telcos is a close cousin of the content-based filtering that they favor for combating piracy. As such, they clearly have an interest in helping ISPs enable some form of network filtering on a non-neutral 'Net. But the actual state of the Internet is less important to the RIAA than blocking piracy so, since it has been far from successful in bringing all ISPs on board the filtering bandwagon, its representative played hardball.
- Jonathan Bailey
on 2008-05-07

A 31 year old file-sharer escaped prison this morning when he received a heavy fine and a suspended sentence for uploading music and movies. The court refrained from putting the defendant in prison, saying that the music industry needs to take some responsibility for the current situation.

Merlin, the non-profit company started by Snocap to handle the rights of independent music labels, has succeeded in becoming the equivalent of the fifth largest record company with the success of just their first month of operation.

This week, a 30 year old man was sentenced to 30 months in prison for his involvement in the so-called pirate ‘warez scene’. In what appears to be some sort of bizarre parallel universe, it’s been revealed that another notorious pirate has an interesting job - he’s chairman of the San Diego Republican Party.